by Amanda Stern
I can’t go from lying so hard to admitting I’ve been lying—it’s just too mortifying. That would mean admitting I am a failure. “I’m not lying,” I say.
“I thought we were best friends,” she says. “But best friends do not lie to each other, and they do not give away special presents!”
“I swear—” I say, desperately trying to make myself admit it. But I can’t.
“I’m leaving,” she says.
“I am telling you the truth! I really did buy that tape for him myself. I did. It’s a coincidence.”
“Funny, because when I gave it to you, do you know what you said?” I can’t remember. “You said, ‘Eddie is going to be so jealous’!”
“I…I was being polite. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” I’m desperately scheming how to sprint over to Bleecker Bob’s and buy another copy of the album so I can show her both together, but I understand that it’s already too late.
“I’m going home,” Amelia says, and she walks out.
I think I’m hyperventilating. The room rushes in on me. I feel like I’m going to be crushed to death in my own house. In my bedroom I sob and sob, hoping to cry out the body butterflies. Eventually, I wake up to a quiet house. Still in my dress and shoes, I grab my pillow and blanket and drag myself down the dark stairwell to my mom’s room, where I curl up on her couch. I know that at thirteen I’m too old to still be doing this, but this is the only place left for me in the world.
* * *
There is only one more day of school until Christmas vacation, and it’s gruesome. My fear is happening: Everyone I love is leaving me, the nightmare unfolding loud and clear in real life.
By the time I get my books from my locker in the morning, Amelia is laughing at the end of the hall with Madison and Tatum, and I can’t stand the sight of them all together without me. When I turn away, something knocks my shoulder and I trip off to the side. I’ve been pushed by Madison, who’s hooked arms with Tatum, who’s hooked arms with Amelia. They are a white picket fence of girls pulling their stakes up away from me, moving to a new, secret location. They unchose me when I’d already been chosen. Just a week ago, I knew where I stood, but now I’m disposable. The world is always changing its mind on me. Once I had a family at school, but now they don’t need me anymore. Maybe they never did.
A burning clot of dread develops under my rib cage. One hundred radios are trapped in my head, all playing different stations at once. Not even Magda is speaking to me anymore. I am invisible because no one will look at me, no one will listen to me, and no one will answer me. I want to yell and scream I TOLD YOU SO at my mom—people do disappear! People go away and they don’t return, just the way I’m still afraid I’ll never return from a weekend away at my dad’s. My friends disappeared into thin air. Just like Melissa and Baba. I don’t exist because I don’t matter. I am a terrible person. I called Tatum a horrible name and I lied to Amelia and I gave my brother the present she gave me and I was caught, and I lied about it, and I deserve to be invisible because someone like me should not count.
1983
Dr. Joan Azam
Summary of Test Impressions
Amanda is a 13-year-old girl having trouble taking tests. There are two factors contributing to Amanda’s poor performance on Standardized Testing: extreme anxiety and difficulty extracting meaning from silent reading.
Amanda’s anxiety around test taking and her fear of failure is so extreme, no test will adequately assess her true ability, aptitude, or level of achievement. Her scores should be interpreted with great caution. At the same time, she does have some obvious learning disabilities. Recommendations are to see a child psychiatrist to treat the anxiety and tutoring to help with learning.
I enjoyed testing Amanda. She was fun to be with and was most cooperative in doing the wide variety of tasks I presented to her. She definitely has many many strengths, along with the areas that need some help and support. I hope that she realizes that the difficulty she has taking Standardized Tests is a specific problem which many people have and does not mean she’s not intelligent. I will happily talk with her if you think that it would help her to understand the wide differences among people.
My Life Stained the World
After Christmas break, I figure everyone will have forgotten they hate me and will talk to me again, but that’s not what happens. I spend January without friends, faking sickness so I can stay home and try to come up with schemes to get myself back in everyone’s good graces. I’m not certain I can live with this feeling much longer. I try to separate myself from the Shallow Countdown sensation that has permanently taken over my body, but I already know the only way is to be relieved from the worry, and I don’t know how to solve this problem. I obsess over possibilities, unable to concentrate on anything else: not homework, or boys, or what Amelia is doing right now. Even though I’m not missing like Etan, my friends have made me disappear. Even though I can see my own body, I can’t seem to feel myself. My mom is no help. She continues to insist that everyone is jealous of me, and it’s starting to enrage me. It’s like she’s not even listening, just playing back the same old recording.
Eddie’s been growing out his hair, wearing combat boots, and dressing more like a punk. At school, he’s been part of the bad crowd for a while, with The Worm and Tony the Terror, but now he’s in the biggest trouble of his life. They all played hooky to get David Bowie concert tickets, but they got caught by a police officer and now he’s suspended from school. He is so lucky. Suspension means missing school, and that would solve all my problems. But how does a person who isn’t Eddie go about getting suspended?
On the days I do go to school, I’m saved by Kara, who lets me into her circle. I make her friends laugh, and they adopt me. I get closer to the kids in the art room, too, and I feel a separate space being carved out for me, one my ex-friends can’t touch. Despite all this, though, I stay angry. Angry for being the one who got rejected, mad that I can’t make it go away, mad that neither my mom nor Kara can protect me from such abandonment and betrayal.
At the end of this year Kara is graduating, and we won’t be in the same place ever again. She won’t be with me at Dad’s house, and she won’t be with me at school. To my body, this feels like a terminal diagnosis, and it begins preparing for her death. Who will protect me if she’s not there? Not Eddie. Why do Eddie and Kara know how to protect themselves when I don’t?
Eddie spends his suspension playing guitar, hanging out in the East Village with his hoodlum friends, and listening to punk music that leaks out from under his closed door, filling the house with its intensity. Something inside me I can’t access is being expressed by the music I’m hearing, as if, in life’s great Memory game, I’ve finally turned over a card that matches me.
He agrees to lend me a couple of albums that I listen to over and over. The music makes me feel invincible and fills me with a sense of confidence that disappears the second the song ends. Eddie’s new look matches this music. He looks tough. When you look tough, people are afraid of you and will not slap you and make the entire grade stop talking to you forever. When you are tough, your worries and fears leave and never ever return.
One night, after distracting my relentlessly nervous body from itself by listening to Eddie’s music, I discover he’s dyed his hair, and the bathroom, maroon. Mom is livid. She does not want him going to school looking like that. It’s not just his hair she can’t stand, it’s also his combat boots and ripped jeans and holey T-shirts. Night after night, Eddie sits calmly on the end of her flowery bed, his combat boots dirtying up the frilly bed skirt while she yells at him, but he won’t change. Jimmy stays out of it. He built himself a workbench in the basement, and now he spends time puttering around with Norman Bates.
Outside, on the street side of life, strangers call his name, and when I’m not with him, they stop me and ask if I’m Eddie Stern’s sister. The transformation that’s undoing my mom in the house is raising Eddie’s profile in the w
orld. Maybe I can transform myself.
I know my timing is good. Mom wants Eddie to fit in and he wants to stand out, and I am standing out but I want to fit in—which is what my mom wants for all her children. Appearances matter to her. She wants us to be normal, and we’re not. She and Dad both are like this—there’s a type of kid they want us to be; it’s obvious by the clothes they make us wear, and the schools we go to, and how we have to dress up when we go on an airplane. They want the world to look at us and be impressed. To be envious of us, and of our parents. The kids they want do well in school and don’t have tutors or stay behind a grade or dye their hair maroon. They want us to match the pictures in their heads, but we don’t. I wait until Eddie leaves and then swap places with him at the end of her bed.
“How do I look more like my friends?” I ask.
“I don’t know. How do your friends look?”
“They all have straight hair,” I say without hesitation.
“So let’s get your hair straightened.”
I feel my octaves grow higher. “You can do that?” I ask. “That exists?”
“Of course,” she says. “People chemically straighten their hair all the time. I’ll make an appointment.”
And just like that, my world opens up again. In one week, I’ll have straight hair and my friends will take me back. But even as this thought makes me deliriously happy, a prickling dread appears.
I tear out images from magazines: Christie Brinkley and Cindy Crawford, along with other beautiful blond models with silky waterfalls of sleekness. When I hand the hairdresser the small pile, he laughs and explains that he can’t “perform miracles” or give birth to a brand-new me. He says he has to work with “the mess that exists,” and then he gets busy burning my eyes with the chemical fumes and wrapping hundreds of pieces of tinfoil in my hair. When he’s finished, my hair is a glossy chestnut brown, and longer than it’s ever been. All the way to my collarbone. He promises me that even after I wash it, it will dry just like this. I’m at once thrilled that my mother suggested this and furious at her for keeping this information from me for so long.
I don’t wash my hair all weekend. On Monday, the teachers all compliment me and other students do double takes. I feel like I’m in an issue of Seventeen magazine. I see Madison, Amelia, and Tatum down the hall. They’re staring at me, I can tell, but I don’t look back. Suddenly, I’m nervous and worried I’ve made a mistake. To prevent myself from walking in their direction, I open my locker and stick my head inside until my breathing slows. It’s not until second period that I come face-to-face with Amelia, when she’s assigned as my lab partner.
“I like your hair,” she says, staring at a test tube.
I can’t believe this. My hair made her speak to me! A long Torah scroll of things I want to change and improve about myself unfolds in my brain. “Thank you,” I say. My mom is a genius.
“How have you been?” she asks with pity.
I know I’m supposed to satisfy this pity. Otherwise, she won’t take me back. “Not very good,” I say, throwing her the same martyred expression my mom uses when she feels she’s been wronged. I hope it works.
“That’s too bad.”
We follow the lab directions and pour some solution into the left test tube and watch it bubble over.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” I say, admitting to nothing.
“Me too,” she says.
We turn the right test tube into a bubbling soda.
“Do you want to sit with us at lunch today?” she asks.
I look at her. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell the other girls we’re being nice to you again,” she says.
“Great!” I say. “Thanks!”
I can’t believe this has been the answer all along. My parents are right. If you look and act like everyone else, you’ll be accepted, and all your bad fortune will reverse. If only I’d straightened my hair when I was a baby. I guess it’s time to dye it blond.
It’s not until we’re all at lunch together, pretending like nothing happened, that I feel something stuck inside me, a residue of despair. As happy as I am to be past this awful experience, I don’t feel as good about myself as I thought I would. I still feel like a bad person, a stupid, ugly person, even with my new hair—which, while it says I must be accepted because I match everyone else, also reminds me that the way I used to be, the way I was born, wasn’t good enough. Even my mom thinks so.
When I hear the other girls making jokes about reversing the decision to take me back, jokes just like my dad would make, I realize I don’t trust them, or anyone else in my grade. I sift each word carefully before saying anything, and even when I say it, I float away from myself just in case it’s wrong. I am constantly floating away.
Turns out, they were wrong about my hair because when I wash it, it doesn’t dry straight, it dries frizzy. Kara tries straightening it for me, but it just turns into straight frizz. It’s not just mortifying—it’s an actual threat to my social life, and therefore my life overall. If I don’t look like them, my friends will bump me out again. Kara suggests a french braid. Lots of girls wear their hair like that. In the morning she gets to work, furiously braiding to disguise the monstrosity. I stare at her in the mirror, trying not to think about the unbearable: What happens next year when she’s gone? Even when I’m not thinking about it, my body holds the information for me, always knocking and trying to get me to look. Kara is thrilled, but I dread her graduation. What’s to celebrate? I’m losing my sister, my second mother. She keeps reminding me that she’ll be home for holidays, but holidays happen only twice a year. I’ve been sobbing every night, going through all the color stages of countdown. Always ending up in Empty Countdown. I need Kara here. I don’t want to be left behind with just Eddie and Holly; Eddie is always in the East Village and never around enough, and even though Holly is less scary than she used to be, I still keep a safe distance, even at school. Everyone likes the french braid, though, so that’s one good thing I can hang my hat on.
Holly is getting in trouble at school, too, and so there are fights now about that. Daniel keeps to himself, and David is at college. Kara never gets into trouble or does anything wrong. She’s so good, in fact, that she’s our mom’s favorite and gets special treatment. Mom even bought tickets for Kara and her friends to see a play on Broadway. I never got that. When Kara is sick in the middle of the night, if she has asthma or is throwing up, my mom gets up and sits with her, but when I’m sick in the middle of the night, she doesn’t do that with me, or with anyone else. She has more in common with Kara than with me. It’s a realization I don’t like, but I know it’s true.
My mom and I get in fights now, too. When she tells me I have to do something I don’t want to do—like call a friend of hers to say sorry about their husband getting sick, or go to a funeral, or some other “right thing,” something that feels terrifying instead of “right”—I say I don’t want to, and this makes her lose her patience with me. She says I’m selfish or a brat and that I never think of anyone but myself. Then I cry on my bed and she comes in and apologizes and takes it all back, but all those words stick inside and never go away.
I can’t get anything right. Everything I do is wrong, and it’s always being pointed out. When it’s not my grades, or my inability to understand how to read a map or take tests, it’s my hair, or my clothes, or my attitude. Why can’t my mom see the things about me that do work, like she does with Kara? I want her to fix me, but she keeps trying to change the parts of me that make me who I am, and not the parts of me that are broken.
* * *
CBGB, Scrap Bar, Mudd Club—these are just a few of Eddie’s favorite places. He hangs out primarily in the East Village now, where purse snatchers toss stolen bags onto tar rooftops. Small piles create a new hilly landscape. Something about his new persona both frightens me and appeals to me. I wouldn’t want to come across him in a dark alley, but I also know he would never hurt anyone. Deep down he�
��s very gentle, but you’d never guess that by looking at him, and I like that a person can keep themselves a secret in this way. I thought my blazer and uniform would do that for me, but they didn’t. It wasn’t the right disguise. I’d hoped that external aids would express to the world what was broken in me that needed fixing, but I didn’t do it right because what they’re trying to fix is different from the thing that’s broken. Like I’ve gone to get a tonsillectomy, but they gave me a neck brace. Now I feel like I need to protect the part of me I’ve always wanted fixed because it’s getting injured every time it’s neglected. Although I do feel pulled toward being like everyone else, to look and act and get good grades like my friends, I know that deep down I couldn’t, even if I tried, because I’m not smart. It might be time to resign myself to that fact.
One day Eddie comes home with a Mohawk and a nose ring, and Mom is furious. A skid mark of long red spikes tracks down his otherwise bald head. I run my hand down my french braid. I’m growing my hair out. Maybe if it’s longer it will get straighter.
“You cannot go to school looking like that,” she yells at him. “What will people think of you? What will people think of me?” she asks, getting more and more agitated.
“Great,” Eddie says. “No school.”
Eddie doesn’t care what people think of him, or if he does, he’s good at hiding it. I care what people think of me too much, which is why I give people what they want, even if it’s not true, which gets me in over my head—like telling Amelia I bought Eddie Hunky Dory when I didn’t—and then I become a bad person.
Some days my brother compromises and goes to school wearing the Mohawk down so his hair is long, but other days he sprays it straight up, molding sections into spikes. He wears army green sweaters and black skinny jeans with holes and safety pins all over them. Someone gave him a job working as a bouncer at a bar called Beulahland on Avenue A between Tenth and Eleventh. No one cares that he’s not eighteen. Eddie is the coolest person I’ve ever met. He’s a real, live punk living in my own house. I’ve seen some of his friends from the East Village and they all look generally the same, although one guy has a tattoo on his face of stripes, like a zebra. They all grabbed at something from the world and made it their very own thing. I don’t know how to do that, but I want to. Part of me feels ready to branch out and away from my mom, to be separate and independent, but part of me is panicked by the very idea. Worse, I sense that she doesn’t even want me to be separate and independent, as if I’m not allowed.
